If the Bishop Were a Witch, She'd Say, "I'm Meltinnngggg....."

One of the Inky's lead stories this morning describes one of the biggest contractions of the Roman Catholic Church in our nation's history. Despite the fact that the population of South Jersey is growing rapidly, the church just announced plans to eliminate almost half of its parishes there because it is unable to attract enough new priests or stop a decades-long hemorrhage of existing parishioners. The church has been severely out of touch with the reality of day-to-day life for most of its parishioners in the anglophonic world since at least the 16th Century. In the past few decades, this gulf between the church's hierarchical, all-male leadership and its parishioners has grown increasingly wider for several obvious reasons that include [but are certainly not limited to] several thousand cases of sexual abuse of children by clergy and the ensuing attempted cover-ups, the selection of a rabidly homophobic and misogynist pope who was at one time a member of the Hitler Youth, and a refusal to allow the use [or even discussion] of various humane and safe prophylactic modalities to prevent life-threatening diseases and unwanted pregnancies.